“I want to be a doctor,” I said as I folded my hands on the table and smiled at my interviewer. “I think it’s the best way I can give my abilities and knowledge back to the world.”
I never knew my grandma well, as well as other children knew their grandmothers through the warm blanket of freshly baked cookies, hand-knitted Christmas sweaters, and sepia-toned wedding photos that swathed their young lives. Throughout my life, I may have only been with her for a grand total of ten prolonged visits. A week of vacation in China here and a few months of America there did not leave nearly enough time for the flow of wisdom from old to young. So, going back this time hurt.
Fresh memories may not produce the most objective reflections, but they are certainly most accurately remembered.
Four weeks ago, when we walked into the hospital room for the first time — a dingy three-bed affair in the cancer ward, and this was the best hospital in Shanghai, mind you — all we saw was one frail, sallow child-sized woman sleeping fitfully under hospital-stamped sheets in one bed, and another woman of similar ghastly appearance sitting up listlessly in the only other occupied bed. The first woman’s face and arms were laced with tubes which extended to pouches of liquid, electronic monitors, machines which provided fresh oxygen to her deteriorating lungs. I had never witnessed someone so feeble, unable to even perform the single most basic human function independently. Her head was covered with a thinning spray of white hair, and she made no sound except for a gasp of air, which startled us out of our initial reverie.
What I didn’t see in that room was my grandmother. My grandmother was the “阳光老太太” of Qingdao, the sunny stout little old lady with the dark black hair and the crinkly, perpetually laughing face. My grandmother was the one who trekked up a steep hill in Qingdao every morning to jump rope and bounce a feathered hacky sack from one foot to another to stay fit. She was the one to visit her numerous friends, walking all across the beautiful little seaside city, with its outdoor street markets and beer vendors and aging buildings, to inquire about them when they were ill.
This sick woman, barely conscious from the excruciating, invisible pain ravaging her body, was not my grandmother. My grandma was the one who took care of everyone else and didn’t rely on anyone. The most tenacious woman in the world could hardly be brought down by anything so petty as the death of both parents when she was only a little girl or anything so trifling as coming of age without a penny to her name.
I believe that the most difficult battle she was fighting in that hospital was not really to defeat the physical cancer that was poisoning her lungs and her bones, but rather to stay alive for a few more days to see her son and daughter and their daughters one last time despite the tantalizingly close possibility of meeting her husband, my grandfather, once again. A lifetime manages to wear away the jagged edge of childhood loss, but there isn’t enough time in the world to heal the sharp pain of losing a lifelong soul mate.
And so I know my grandmother did not die because she was weary of life. Her vivacious spirit was never ready to expire. At the same time, she did not fear death in the slightest but rather welcomed it as only the final step in a long and good life.
After she passed away on the morning of Friday, December 27, I held her poster-sized x-rays spreads in both hands and looked at the amorphous blackness of varying sizes inside her ribcage. My grandfather was a lifelong smoker. Almost always, my grandparents’ little flat was fogged with an endemic, spicy haze. And yet, before she began slipping in and out of the realm of conscious life and fitful sleep, my grandmother said, “Can I blame your grandfather for this? No.” Back when goods like cigarettes were rationed by the government, she explained, my grandfather — only a young man then — posed as a smoker in order to bring home more cigarettes for his mother, who was a smoker. Pretend turned to reality, and the little sacrifices for family turned into the ultimate sacrifices, for both my grandfather and, eventually, my grandmother.
I have certainly never given so selflessly of myself. I have not even seen anything resembling the hardships that my forebears have overcome. What’s worse, however, was that as I experienced the sights and sounds of the Shu Guang hospital, I began to have doubts about my longtime professed interest in medicine. I was disgusted partly by the sickness that pervaded every pore of the building, partly by feeling completely helpless to do anything about it, and partly from feeling disgusted in the first place. Thinking back on all those college interviews and conversations with adults, I felt like nothing but a phony.
Three weeks ago, I realized that I had never really known the meaning of life or death, and I’m not sure that I do now either. I don’t know if I want to continue on the career that I’ve allegedly set my heart on since I was eight. But if I can’t even give this of myself, then what were all my grandparents’ sacrifices for? So that I could live a comfortable, meaningless life, and leave without seeming to have been on this world at all? I don’t have an answer — it’s still far too soon, the experience is far too fresh for me to conclude anything.
Maybe in a few years I will still want nothing to do with hospitals. But maybe I will also realize that just because finding a cure to cancer seems futile does not mean that no one should try at all. Perhaps the dream of becoming an Economics professor at the Qingdao University Medical College also seemed out of reach for a young orphan girl over seventy years ago.
It’s too bad that we rarely reflect on a person’s life until he or she is gone, but when we do, we realize that what kind of person we think we are is not as important as thinking about what kind of person we want to be.
I have not had a college interview since then. I do not know what I will say at the next one. I’m not comfortable with not knowing all the answers yet, but I believe that one day I can be.
